labour with all diligence to make our call- | Lord God merciful and gracious-to call ing and election sure.. We call upon you, in the language of the Apostle, to have faith, and to this faith add virtue, and knowledge, and temperance, and patience, and godliness, and brotherly kindness, and charity. It is by the doing of these things, that you are made sure of your calling and election, "for if ye do these things," says Peter, "ye shall never fail, and an entrance shall be ministered unto you abundantly into the everlasting kingdom of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ." you to the service of Christ, that great Master of the household of faith-to urge it upon you, that you must renounce every other master, and, casting all your idols, and vanities, and iniquities away from you, to close with the invitation, and be diligent in all the duties and performances of the Gospel. If you resist, or put off-if, blind to the goodness of God in Christ Jesus, you suffer it not to lead you to repentance-if the call of "awake to righteousness, and sin not," make no practical impression on you sins of the past, do not fill your heart with the desire of sanctification for the futureif the word of Christ be not so received by you as to lead to the doing of it-then you are just leaving undone those things, of which we say in the words of the text, "Except these things be done, ye cannot be saved"-and to all the guilt of your past disobedience, you add the aggravation of putting away from you both the offered atonement and the commanded repentance of the Gospel, and "how can you escape if you neglect so great a salvation?" If there be any of you who have not fol--if the true assurance of pardon for the lowed this train of observation-if it still remain one of those things of Paul which are hard to be understood-let us beseech you, at least, that you wrest it not to your own destruction, by remitting your activity, and your diligence, and your pains-taking in the service of Christ. Why, the doctrine of election leaves our duty to exhort, and your duty to obey, on the same footing on which it found them. We are commissioned to lay before you the free offer of the Gospel-to press it on the acceptance of one and all of you-to assure every individual amongst you of a hearty welcome from the . SERMON XII. On the Nature of the Sin against the Holy Ghost, "Wherefore I say unto you, All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men. And whosoever speaketh a word against the Son of man, it shall be forgiven him: but whosoever speaketh against the Holy Ghost, it shall not be forgiven him, neither in this world, neither in the world to come."-Matthew xii. 31, 32. LET us never suspend the practical in- | feebler voice; and coming always nearer fluence of what we do know, by.idly rambling in a vain and impertinent pursuit after what we do not know. Thus much we know from the Bible, that God refuses not his Holy Spirit to them who ask it-that every right movement of principle within us is from him-that when we feel an impulse of conscience, we feel the Spirit of God knocking at the door of our hearts, and challenging from us that attention and that obedience which are due to the great Lawgiver that if we follow not the impulse, we provoke and dissatisfy him who is the Author of it--and that there is such a thing as tempting him to abandon us altogether, and to surrender the friendly office of plying us any longer with his admonitions and his warnings. Hence, an emphatic argument for immediate repentance. By every moment of delay, we hasten upon ourselves the awful crisis of being let alone. The conscience is every day getting harder; and he who sits behind, and is the unseen Author of all its instigations, is lifting every day a and nearer to that point in the history of every determined sinner, when, left to his own infatuation, he can hold up a stubborn and unyielding front to all that instrumentality of advice and of expostulation which is brought to bear upon him. The preacher plies him with his weekly voice, but the Spirit refuses to lend it his constraining energy; and all that is tender, and all that is terrifying in his Sabbath argument plays around his heart, without reaching it. The judgments of God go abroad against him, and as he carries his friends or his children to the grave, a few natural tears may bear witness to the tenderness he bore thembut that Spirit who gives to these judgments all their moral significancy, withholds from him the anointing which remaineth, and the man relapses as before into all the obstinate habits, and all the uncrucified affections which he has hitherto indulged in. The discase gathers upon him, and gets a more rooted inveteracy than ever; and thus it is, that there are thousands and thousands more, who, though active and astir on that living scene of population which is around us, have an iron hardness upon their souls, which makes them, in reference to the things of God, dark and sullen as the grave, and fast locks them in all the insensibility of spiritual death. Is there no old man of your acquaintance, who realizes this sad picture, of one left to himself that we have now attempted so rapidly to set before you? Then know, that by every deed of wilful sin, that by every moment of wilful delay in the great matter of repentance, that by every stifled warning of conscience, that by every deafening of its authoritative voice among the temptations of the world, and the riot of lawless acquaintances, you are just moving yourself to the limits of this helpless and irrecoverable condition. We have no doubt, that you may have the intention of making a violent step, and suddenly turning round to the right path ere you die. But this you will not do but by an act of obedience to the reproaches of a conscience that is ever getting harder. This you will not do without the constraining influence of that Spirit, who is gradually dying away from you. This you will not do but in virtue of some overpowering persuasion from that monitor who is now stirring within you, but with whom you are now taking the most effectual method of drowning his voice, and disarming him of all his authority. Do not you perceive, that in these circumstances, every act of delay is madness-that you are getting by every hour of it into deeper water-that you are consolidating a barrier against your future return to the paths of righteousness, which you vainly think you will be able to surmount when the languor and infirmity of old age have got hold of you-that you are strengthening and multiplying around you, the wiles of an entanglement, which all the strugglings of deathbed terror cannot break asunder-that you are insulting the Spirit of God by this daily habit of stifling and neglecting the other and the other call that he is sounding to your moral ear, through the organ of conscience. And O the desperate hazard and folly of such a calculation! Think you, think you, that this is the way of gaining his friendly presence at that awful moment, when the urgent sense of guilt and of danger forces from the sinner an imploring cry as he stands on the brink of eternity? "How long, ye simple ones, will ye love simplicity, and the scorners delight in their scorning, and fools hate knowledge? Turn ye at my reproof. Behold I will pour out my spirit unto you; I will make known my words unto you. Because I have called, and ye refused; I have stretched out my hand, and no man regarded; but ye have set at nought all my counsel, and would none of my reproof: I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when your fear cometh. When your fear cometh as deso lation, and your destruction cometh as a whirlwind; when distress and anguish cometh upon you: then shall they call upon me, but I will not answer; they shall seek me early, but they shall not find me." You see, then, how a man may shut against himself all the avenues of reconciliation. There is nothing mysterious in the kind of sin by which the Holy Spirit is tempted to abandon him to that state in which there can be no forgiveness, and no return unto God. It is by a movement of conscience within him, that the man is made sensible of sin-that he is visited with the desire of reformation-that he is given to feel his need both of mercy to pardon, and of grace to help him-in a word, that he is drawn unto the Saviour, and brought into that intimate alliance with him by faith, which brings down upon him both acceptance with the Father, and all the power of a new and a constraining impulse, to the way of obedience. But this movement is a suggestion of the Spirit of God, and if it be resisted by any man, the Spirit is resisted. The God who offers to draw him unto Christ, is resisted. The man refuses to believe, because his deeds are evil; and by every day of perseverance in these deeds, the voice which tells him of their guilt, and urges him to abandon them, is resisted; and thus, the Spirit ceases to suggest, and the Father, from whom the Spirit proceedeth, ceases to draw, and the inward voice ceases to remonstrate; and all this because their authority has been so often put forth, and so often turned from. This is the deadly offence which has reared an impassable wall against the return of the obstinately impenitent. This is the blasphemy to which no forgiveness can be granted, because in its very nature, the man who has come this length, feels no movement of conscience towards that ground on which alone for giveness can be awarded to him--and where it is never refused even to the very worst and most malignant of human iniquities. This is the sin against the Holy Ghost. It is not peculiar to any one age. It does not lie in any one unfathomable mystery. It may be seen at this day in thousands and thousands more, who, by that most familiar and most frequently exemplified of all habits, a habit of resistance to a sense of duty, have at length stifled it altogether, and driven their inward monitor away from them, and have sunk into a profound moral lethargy, and so will never obtain forgivenessnot because forgiveness is ever refused to any who repent and believe the Gospel, but because they have made their faith and their repentance impracticable. They choose not to repent; and this choice has been made so often and so perseveringly, that the Spirit has let them alone. They have obstinately clung to their love of darkness rather than of light, and the Spirit has at length turned away from them since they will have it so. They wish not to believe, because their deeds are evil, and that Spirit has ceased to strive with them, who has so often spoken to them in vain; and whose many remonstrances have never prevailed upon them to abandon the evil of their doings. guilt that can meet with no forgiveness, is not that one or all of your sins are of a die so deep and so inveterate, that the cleansing power of the Saviour's atonement cannot overmatch them. Let the invitation to the fountain that is opened in the house of Judah, circulate among you as freely as the preacher's voice; for sure we are, that there does not stand, at this moment, within the reach of hearing us, any desperado in vice, so sunk in the depths of his dark and unnatural rebellion, that he is not welcome if he will. But, if ye will not come that ye may have life, this is your sin. This is the barrier in the way of your forgiveness. Grant us repentance and faith, and we know not of a single mysterious crime in the whole catalogue of human depravity, that the atoning blood of our Saviour cannot wash away. But withhold from us repentance and faith-let us see the man who stands unrebuked out of his wickedness by all that conscience has reproached him with-unmoved out of the hardness of his unbelief by all that power of tenderness, which should have softened his unrelenting bosom, when told of the Saviour who had poured out his soul unto the death for him Take all this attentively along with you, and the whole mysteriousness of this sin against the Holy Ghost should be done away. Grant him the office with which he is invested in the Word of God, even the office of instigating the conscience to all its reprovals of sin, and to all its admonitions of repentance-and then, if ever you witnessed the case of a man whose conscience had fallen into a profound and irrecoverable sleep, or, at least, had lost to such a degree its power of control over him, that he stood out against every engine which was set up to bring him to the faith and the repentance of the New Testament-behold in such a man a sinner against conscience to such a woful extent, that conscience had given up its direction of him; or, in other words, a sinner against the Holy Ghost to such an if all this contempt and resistance of his extent, that he had let down the office of has been so long and so grievously persisted warning him away from that ground of in, that the Spirit has ceased to strive-then, danger and of guilt on which he stood so it is not the power of the Gospel that is in immovably posted; or, of urging him on- fault, but the obstinacy of him who has reward to that sure road of access, where if a jected it. The sufficiency of the Gospel is man seek for pardon, he will never miss it, not detracted from by so much as a jot or a and where, if he cry for the clean heart and tittle. To this very hour may we proclaim the right spirit, he will not cry in vain. it as the savour of life unto life, to the very And as there is nothing dark or incom-worst of sinners who receive it. But if he prehensible in the nature of this sin, so there is nothing in it to impair the freeness of the Gospel, or the universality of its calls and of its offers, or its power of salvation to all who will, or that attribute which is expressly ascribed to it, that where sin abounded, grace did much more abound. It is never said that pardon through that blood, which is distinctly stated to cleanse from all sin-it is A king publishes a wide and unexpected nowhere said, that this pardon is extended amnesty to the people of a rebellious disto any but to those who believe. If you do trict in his empire, upon the bare act of not believe, you do not get pardon-and if each presenting himself within a limited you will not believe, because you love dark-period, before an authorized agent, and proness rather than light-if you will not be- fessing his purposes of future loyalty. Does lieve, because you will not abandon those it at all detract from the clemency of this evil deeds which the Spirit tells you through deed of grace, that many of the rebels feel the conscience, that you must forsake in a strong reluctance to this personal exhibicoming unto Christ-if his repeated calls tion of themselves; and that the reluctance have been so unheeded and so withstood by strengthens and accumulates upon them by you, that he has at length ceased from striv-every day of their postponement; and that ing, then the reason why your sin is unpar- even before the season of mercy has expired, donable, is just because you have refused it has risen to such a degree of aversion on the Gospel salvation. The reason why your their part, as to form a moral barrier in the case is irrecoverable, is just because you way of their prescribed return, that is altohave refused the method of recovery so gether impassable? Will you say, because long, and so often, that every call of repen- there is no forgiveness to them, that there tance has now come to play upon you in is any want of amplitude in that charter of vain. The reason why you lie under a forgiveness which is proclaimed in the hear so turn aside from its invitations, and the habit be so fixed with him, and conscience get into a state of such immovable dormancy, that the Spirit gives him over, it is not that the Gospel does not carry a remedy along with it for one and all of his offences, but because he refuses that Gospel, that it is to him the savour of death unto death. ing of all; or, that pardon has not been provided for every offence, because some of fenders are to be found, with such a degree of perverseness and of obstinacy in their bosom, as constrains them to a determined refusal of all pardon? The blood of Christ cleanseth from all sin; and there is not a human creature, who, let him repent and believe, will ever find the crimson inveteracy of his manifold of fences to be beyond the reach of its purifying and its peace-speaking power. And tell us if it detract by a single iota from the omnipotence of this great Gospel remedy, that there are many sinners in the world who refuse to lay hold of it. To the hour of death it is within the reach of all and of any who will. This is the period in the history of each individual, at which this great act of amnesty expires, and to the last minute of his life, it is competent for me and for every minister of the Gospel to urge it upon him, in all the largeness and in all the universality which belong to it-and to assure him, that there is not a single deed of wickedness with which his faithful memory now agonizes him, not one habit of disobedience that now clothes his retrospect of the past in the sad colouring of despair, all the guilt of which, and all the condemnation of which, the blood of the offered Saviour cannot do away. But, though we may offer, that is not to say that he will accept. Though we may proclaim, and urge the proclamation in his hearing, with every tone of truth and of tenderness, that is not to say, that our voice will enter with power, or make its resistless way through those avenues of his heart, where he has done so much to rear a defending barrier, that may prove to be impenetrable. Though there be truth in our every announcement, that is not to say, that the demonstration of the Spirit will accompany it-even that Spirit who long ere now may have left to himself the man, who, his whole life long, has grieved and resisted him. It is still true, that the pardon lies at his acceptance: and it may be as true, that there can be no pardon to him because he has brought such an inveterate blindness upon his soul, that he will neither receive the truth, nor love it, nor feel those genuine impulses by which it softens the heart of man to repentance. And thus it is, that while the blood of Christ cleanseth the every sin of every believer, the sin against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven, because with this sin, and with its consequences upon him, man wills not, and repents not, and believes not. And now for the interesting question,How am I to know that I have committed this sin, that is said to be beyond the reach of forgiveness? We are sure that the right solution of this question, if well understood, would go to dissipate all that melancholy | which has been felt upon the subject, by many a bewildered inquirer. You cannot take a review of the years that are gone, and fetch up this mysterious sin to your remembrance out of the history of the sins that are past. There is not one of them, which, if turned away from, in the faith of that pardon that is through the blood of the atonement-there is not one of them beyond the reach of the great redemption of the Gospel. The sin against the Holy Ghost is not some awful and irrevocable deed, around which a disordered fancy has thrown its superstitious array, and which beams in deeper terror upon the eye of the mind, from the very obscurity by which it is encompassed. There ought to be no darkness and no mystery about it. The sin against the Holy Ghost is such a daring and obstinate rebellion against the prerogatives of conscience-that all its calls to penitency have been repelled-and all the urgency of its admonitions to flee to the offered Saviour, has been withstood-and all this obstinacy of resistance has been carried forward to such a point in the history of the unhappy man, that his conscience has ceased from the exercise of its functions; and the Holy Spirit has laid down his office of prompting it; and the tenderness of a beseeching God may be sounded in his ear-but unaccompanied as it is by that power which makes a willing and obedient people, it reaches not his sullen and inflexible heart. And instead, > therefore, of looking for that sin among those imaginary few who mourn and are in distress, under an overwhelming sense of its enormity, I look for it to those thousands, who, trenched among the secularities of the world, or fully set on the mad career of profligacy, are posting their careless and infatuated way-and suffering Sabbaths and opportunities to pass over themand turn with contempt from the foolishness of preaching-and hold up the iron front of insensibility against all that is appalling in the judgments of God-and cling to this perishable scene under the most touching experiences of its vanity-and walk their unfaltering path amid all the victims which mortality has strewn around them-and every year drink deeper into the spirit of the world--till the moral disease rises to such an inveteracy, that all the engines of conversion, unaided as they are, by that peculiar force and demonstration which is from on high, fall powerless as infancy upon them, and every soul amongst them, sunk in torpor immovable, will never, never be made to know the power and the life of a spiritual resurrection. We know nothing that goes farther to nullify the Bible, than the habit of subjecting the interpretation of its passages to any other principle, than that all its parts must consist and be in harmony with each other. ceive to occur but seldom in the history of human wickedness. They would say, that there is forgiveness to no sin whatever but on the faith and the repentance of him who has incurred it-and we must, therefore, suppose this, and qualify the clause by this indispensable condition, and thus make the clause to tell us, how such is the power of the Gospel, that all the sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven of those who have embraced it-save that one sin against the Holy Ghost, for the remission of which, not even their acceptance of the Gospel of Christ could avail them. There has a world of mischief been done by the modifications that have been laid on the obvious meaning of Scripture, with the purpose of rendering it more palatable to our independent views of what is right, and wise, and reasonable. This, in fact, is deposing the word of God from that primitive authority. which belongs to it, as the court of highest appeal--all whose decisions are final and irreversible. Grant us that there is no contradiction between what we find in the book of God's counsel, and what we know by the evidence of our own experience, or the overbearing testimony of others -and such we hold to be the ignorance of Now, the explanation we have given of man about the whole of that spiritual and this sin renders all this work of annexing unseen world which lies beyond the circle terms and modifications to this verse of the of his own observation, that we count it not Bible unnecessary, and gives, we think, even merely his most becoming piety, but we to its literal and unrestricted meaning, a count it also his soundest and most en- most lucid consistency with all that is leadlightened philosophy, to sit down with the ing and that is undeniable in the doctrine docility of a little child to all that is inti- of the New Testament. If the sin against mated and made known to him by a well- the Holy Ghost be just that sin, in virtue of attested revelation.. After the deductions we which the calls and offers of the Gospel are have just now made, we know of no other so rejected, as to be finally and irreversibly principle on which we should ever offer to put away from us, then it is true, it is absomodify a verse or a clause of the written lutely and unreservedly true, that all other record; but the principle of that entire con- manner of sin shall be forgiven but this one sistency which must reign throughout all only. All who so reject this Gospel, have its communications. We know of no other sinned against the Holy Ghost-and none cross-examination which we have a right to who accept this Gospel have incurred this set up on this witness to the invisible things sin, nor shall they want the forgiveness that of faith-than to try it by itself, and to con- is there provided for them. It is quite in demn it, if possible, out of its own mouth, vain to think, that the sin against the Holy by confronting together its own depositions. Ghost is confined to that period of the world We are only at freedom to sustain or to at which our Saviour made his personal apqualify the literal sense of one of its an-pearance in it. The truth is, that it is since nouncements, by the literal and equally authoritative sense of some other of its announcements. And such is our respect for the paramount authority of Scripture, that we know of no discovery more pleasing, than that by which the apparent inconsistency between two places, is so cleared up, that all necessity for encroaching upon the literal sense of either of them is completely done away-for it goes to establish our every impression of the unviolable sanctity of its various communications, and to heighten our belief that every semblance of opposition between the particulars of the divine testimony, exists not in the testimony itself, but in the misapprehension of our own dark and imperfect understandings. Now, if you look to the 31st verse of the 12th chapter of Matthew, you will perceive, that all who think the sin against the Holy Ghost to lie in the commission of some rare and monstrous, but at the same time specific iniquity, cannot admit the first clause of the verse without qualifying it by some of the undeniable doctrines of the New Testament. They would say, it is not true that all manner of sin shall be forgiven unto men, with the exception of this blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, which they con Christ withdrew from the world, that he now carries forward by the Spirit, as his agent and substitute, the business of press ing home upon men the acceptance of the Gospel, by working with their consciences. He employs the Spirit as his witness, since he himself has gone away from us; and as in the business of entertaining the calls and the offers of the New Testament, our doings are more exclusively with this Spirit, and not at all with the Saviour himself personally, we are surely as much in the way of now committing the sin in question, as in those days when the Holy Ghost was not so abundantly given, because Jesus Christ was not then glorified. All those, be assured, who refuse the Gospel now, do so because they refuse the testimony of this witnessdo so because they stifle within them the urgency of his rebuke, when he tells them of faith and of repentance-do so when he offers to convince them on principles that would be clear to themselves, could they only be so far arrested by the imperious claims of God and of eternity, as to attend to them-convince them that they are indeed on a way of guilt and of alienation, which, if not turned from, through the revealed Mediator, will land them in the condemna |